


Heart of Darkness

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Gay Bashing, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Vermont, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-18 20:16:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4719059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vermont, 1969. "It was 9am, summer Sunday, strains of the White Album on the jukebox and Remus was in the diner at the edge of town when Albus came in the door shaking the hanging bells."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart of Darkness

Vermont 1969 – it was 9am, summer Sunday, strains of the White Album on the jukebox and Remus was in the diner at the edge of town when Albus came in the door shaking the hanging bells. Remus had gone through four cigarettes in the back booth ashing them out in the cold thickening dregs of his burnt coffee and watching at the leaves outside, themselves also thickening or seeming to in the shifting light, spreading shadow like asphalt through butter, or perhaps – but Albus sat down, smelling like the hash he was presently harvesting, and he put his newspaper on the table, and Remus read upside-down through half the headline. It was about My Lai again, and on the jukebox – I need a fix cause I’m goin down – and Remus felt for a second with a blinding dissociative clarity, I have lived this before…

It had been happening like that since the last round of electroshock and besides he had indeed lived this before.

The redheaded waitress was Lily Evans’ mother and she brought coffee and two new mugs. Albus emptied into his half the tin pitcher of rich sweating cream and three sugars. With the base of the mug he drew, almost absently, from the folds of the newspaper another slip of paper, upside down with the black ink bleeding through showing his own hand, by the printing on the page torn from his Old Farmer’s Almanac, and when Remus reached for his own mug he took the slip too pressed between his finger and the ceramic then palmed it and slipped it into the left pocket of his jeans, the one without the hole. Albus was talking about something, not about the war, not really about anything, like he was sort of wont to do, and Remus’s brain had not yet ordered itself thoroughly from its having been shuffled, and it was like trying to put back in order a dropped deck of cards, except without remembering numbers.

Albus said, “Remus?”

He looked up from his hands in his lap. He was thinking, I have seen the photograph in the newspaper before. It wouldn’t tear out of his peripheral. He could tell it from half of it, but of course he had seen it before, because it had happened early in the year previous, not long removed from other things.

Albus paid the check with change; it was only a couple cents for the two coffees. Absently Remus watched him while he left, bells again clanging, and while he drove past the diner and North up the highway in his blue Volkswagen with the gray beard flying like Hokusai spume out the window, and the jukebox was playing Yer Blues. Remus watched at the waitresses. In the front they were laughing with the two cooks through the sliver window into the hot kitchen, distorted behind the pie case. He watched at them while he took from his pocket the slip of paper Albus had given him, upon which was written the name of the next draft dodger Pettigrew would bring North from Albany and with whom Remus would rendezvous in this very diner then drive in his dad’s old pickup North still from Barre to the Canadian border at Richford, where Potter would be waiting to complete the final leg to Montreal. Remus himself did not have a passport and could not cross into Quebec. He was not sure what happened after they left his car. They went toward the checkpoint and Potter’s headlights beyond in silhouette in the predawn and they had been promised amnesty by the Canadian government.

The name on the paper was _S. Black_ and the date was August 29 and the time 7:30pm. Four days. Remus put it back in his pocket and stood and dusted the ash from his jeans. The déjà vu thing had shut down but the tile spun and smeared and he held to the red Formica table for a second, fingers slipping in bacon grease, until it straightened. In the silence between tracks on the jukebox he felt the waitresses looking at him with their eyes larger like raccoons’ through the pie case, saucery like – and he went out the door with the jangling of the bells as the guitar gently gathered. Into the still wind. Was it still if it was wind? He thought about sitting outside and having a few cigarettes beneath the open window so he could hear Helter Skelter.

Instead he went driving pretending he was not looking but he was looking. There was nothing on the radio but static and the relation of Events which was itself static. In a traffic light on the edge of Montpelier he noticed in the side mirror there was a certain slant of summer sunlight and angle of his chin where it wasn’t so bad, his face and jaw and the pale quarter of his neck in his shirtcollar he meant, but there was no telling as to the rest of it, and he thought likely he deserved it anyway, because it was a reminder he was working at something always, and because it had gotten him out of the war, it and its atavistic source, and it was only fair to exchange blood for blood. And in the worst moments just after the therapy when his brain would only order the things it was trying to erase, trying to shred like documents, when it recalled the things that had brought it here, his whole body here, he would think, by now certainly they are both dead, because certainly the draft had got them, and certainly they were both cowards, and certainly the first minute they saw Viet Cong they would freeze up solid. Yes, by now certainly they were both dead and what sweet surety. When he could work his brain it was all in a file folder. He could not open it or it would take weeks to clean up again.

He drove Westerly still into the capitol nevermind he knew logically he was too far out now to find the house. Still he drove up into the wooded back roads tracing the silver spidersilk filaments of the memory, and when he could pick up the college radio from Burlington it played some old Dylan, and he put the window down and half leaned out it into the spreading humid day. The potholes were so deep he started tasting blood in his mouth. In the thick rainforest shade, slivers of blue above and sunless, there was no hiding the true face.

\-- 

Not long after – in the dry heatwave June after – Albus came to the house to see about buying some of the piglets. Remus’s father was out in the far field and besides they had not spoken in weeks, especially now Remus could get up and walk around without a stick. At first they had been able to say it was an accident on the farm but word got out especially once Remus started seeing Dr. Slughorn who was a friend of his mother’s on account of he prescribed her Valium as he did to most of the other women in Barre. After that there had been no more offers of help and there had been no more ambrosia salad. Remus had gone to Montpelier to change his draft status and in the office they regarded him as he struggled to hold the pen and fill out his own name on the paperwork as though they suspected he had done this on purpose. The doctors had taken the big cast off his leg but they said only time would tell if the hairline fracture in his skull would heal on its own or if they would need to do surgery later in order to insert a steel plate. Certainly the scars would never go away, and the staple marks on all the sides of them. It had been months since he had seen Albus; around Christmas they had cut the tree on his property but everything had gone FUBAR in the interim and now Remus was on the back porch drinking cold black coffee against the haze of the Valium, playing Sgt. Peppers’ on the turntable inside, and his mother was upstairs in bed, where she would remain until the day she died, which was not long distant.

Albus had called from the library in town in advance of his arrival and when Remus heard tires on the gravel he went out front and watched the blue Volkswagen round the hill past the old cemetery (Vermont Lupins since 1640 there buried: a few gravestones even featured dated inscriptions in French) and the old smokehouse, out of commission now a decade, but in which Remus and his father had once strung strips of trout and venison. Albus parked next to the pickup Remus shared with his father and unfolded himself out, long skinny limbs like an insect, beard and vibrant caftan flowing. “Good God, boy,” he said.

Remus just said, “Yeah.”

They went in the barn to discuss the piglets. They were really quite sweet and they were all sleeping. Remus had always named them as a child but he could not summon the will nor the imagination anymore. Still the ones that Albus selected he thought he would have called George and Ringo. They put them in the Volkswagen and Albus drew a twenty and a joint from the leather pouch around his neck and handed the cash to Remus. The roach they smoked together sitting on the back bumper of the Volkswagen. Remus had not touched pot in a long time. At the first taste of it he thought he felt thread start unspooling far in the back of his brain. A storm was blowing in, and Albus said, “Remus, why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“Anyone in town could tell you.”

“I’d like to hear it directly from the source.”

Albus had been a philosophy professor at Bennington until he started dropping acid, which you could tell from looking at him: the professorial bit, and the lysergic bit. Remus thought he could have been a psychoanalyst. His eyes were investigative more than accusatory but the methodology was the same, and the impulse. “Got beat up,” said Remus, but even that was hard to say. He passed the joint back to Albus. He could smell the rain now.

“Anyone could see that,” said Albus, but gently.

Thunder. Remus sighed smoke, then he said, “Well, for being fuckin queer.”

Albus passed the joint back. The tiny glowing ember of it was so short Remus had to pinch the damp paper between his thumb and forefinger and it burnt his upper lip when he brought it to his mouth. When he nearly put it out Albus said “Don’t drop that, son, there’s a hit left at least.” Then, in all refined seriousness, “You ought to go to San Francisco.”

“Can’t leave,” Remus said. “My mom.”

“Did your assailant bust up your head enough you can’t articulate yourself like a grown man anymore?”

“Assailants,” Remus corrected, “plural. Two.” He waggled his first two fingers and spat in the dry dust. “Let me reiterate. I can’t leave, because my mom is sick, and because my dad can’t find anyone else to help him work this land.”

“Then,” Albus said, with his stoned eyes, “what are you going to do, Remus.”

“Die here. Get buried down there. Let all the fields go and kill off the bloodline.”

“That’s no way to look at it.”

“Better that it would happen here,” said Remus, though he wasn’t sure he believed it, “than in Vietnam.”

Albus was quiet, then he stood. Remus wanted to, or perhaps he didn’t. The storm – he could feel the breath, wind, the rain, breath. Thunder like a heart beating and now across the green summer valleys an edge of lightning that swelled in the clouds. His head unbidden completely started playing Jumpin Jack Flash and in the sound of it he could feel Albus sizing him up with some psychic tape measure. In the field his father’s tractor coming closer in advance of the rain, but Remus felt a drop even now upon his lip, and the water was sweet. Albus said, “How’d you like to help me with something.”

 --

What had happened – he woke, and recalled the long bridge of the Doors’ The End, and the line about the wilderness of pain. He did not remember having walked to the highway though they told him he had but he remembered the house – there’s danger on the edge of town – and he recalled the red Mustang. Not the name. A police officer came when he could hardly speak nor could he hold a pencil to write, and they never came again. He took a face from the ancient gallery, and he walked on down the hall inside his own mind. When he was awake he would flinch from the memory. In sleep or in some half-waking animal state he approached it, face smeared in greasepaint, running in the forest, crouched low, quiet in the brush. He had left all the weaponry elsewhere or perhaps he had lost it, if he had ever had it to begin with, and the forest closed in, and he could hear whispering in it, and part of him knew he was dreaming, and part of him was still not sure.

He watched at it like he would the camp of his enemy but it was he himself in it. And he let it play as it had happened and he recalled, it was a tall young man, blonde and handsome, and his skin a sun-brown despite it was a cold April – mixing memory and desire – and he was chain-smoking outside the Leaky in Montpelier, leaning up against his red Mustang, and Remus asked him for a light. He was drunk and not thinking and he had forfeited, for once, he thought, his customary vigilance. What he thought he wanted was still illegal, but he was looking at this kid’s hands, and then he was certain some covenant was made when they met eyes. The cupped hand lingered against his cheek to shield the lighter flare from the night breeze. A flake of snow spiraling in the butter light from the bar – and something passed up Remus’s spine, like a chill but warm, and he thought it was certainty. When he got in the car it felt like music, he thought, abstractly, like something like the 13th Floor Elevators, like someone was playing him with a lot of reverb. Everything vibrating. They stopped for gas in Berlin beneath the highway and Remus waited in the car. The guy came back with a 40 and a joint he had drawn from his shirtpocket and they kept driving. Remus shut his eyes and the map inside his head twisted. He had never been able to find the place again. It was an abandoned farmhouse on a big lot, whitewashed with the paint peeling, luminescent in the moonlight, the stars above wheeling, everything sliding off inside his brain, and this guy whom he followed inside, and who turned to him. Then there was another set of footsteps in the dark, and something changed inside the face. The shadow falling between the motion and the act. A cold stone of panic fell through him, sobering, like a long fall from a cliff, and instead of his brain turning back on some little animal he had never known woke up, screaming, RUN –

He tried but there were two of them and they were fast. They dragged him back in the house and he tried to scrabble at the ground but they stepped hard on both his hands and they wore boots with metal-plated toes. He didn’t hear a thing they said because his mind was screaming, first in terror, then in pain, and there was a sound in the house (the wind under the door) and then the memory slipped away entire, into a shaking black void, tearing at the edges.

Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?

When he woke up in the hospital and could order words they told him, your skull is fractured. Someday you may need surgery. Your nose is broken but your eye will heal; it looks worse than it really is. Your leg – you will need physical therapy. You might walk with a limp the rest of your life. And your ribs – three are broken, and one so badly that it punctured your lung. “It is a miracle,” said the doctor, who looked at his forehead instead of his eyes, “that you survived.” Other things had been done that they allowed him to discover for himself. They said he must have walked to Route 63 because he had been found there by a passing peach farmer and taken to the hospital in the back of his pickup wrapped in canvas feed bags against the dawn chill and the frost upon the steel. The soles of his feet were lacerated and his knees and palms skinned from falling.

His mother brought a radio and on clear days he could pick up the university station from Burlington. In those days – the dawn of his sleeplessness – he would lie awake nights to hear the students’ shows with the pacifist proselytizing and the wild music, and it seemed it spoke for him alone. “Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand… in a desperate land…”

They had burned nearly all his bloody clothes but they gave him the big duck coat he had been wearing which was in fact his father’s and which he recalled having taken off in the red Mustang and which they must have left with him, because they feared pollution. There was blood browning on the soft plaid flannel inside and his father would never take it back even months later after Remus scrubbed nearly all of the blood away with hydrogen peroxide and a toothbrush.

Later it would give him a sick and bloody satisfaction that his unassuming presence alone could cause grown men such melodramatic paroxysms of disgust and horror nevermind he had the same blood and worked the same earth and had been eligible for the same draft. That they would leave him with the duck coat whose warmth had perhaps saved his life because they feared its contagion. That they would pretend to seduce him so they could beat him near to death because they feared him, or that thing about him; perhaps they feared it in themselves. He drove around at night because he could not sleep. He drove along Route 63 and the back roads and he drove 62 and 64 and 12 and 14 and 15, 12A as far as Roxbury, 110 and 113 as far South as Lyme; he drove 302 all the way to New Hampshire and along East to the edge of the lake; he never found the house again. On the worst nights he wondered if it had happened at all or if he had done it to himself in some fit. He knew his father suspected he was out fucking and could not bring himself to care. The horror crept up when he did not expect it and in his scant dreams he was running in the forest.

In the diner when he met the skittish quiet boys Pettigrew brought up from New York the townspeople stared, but they stared at Remus. Then they turned to each other and shook their heads. Remus would pay the check; Albus would reimburse him for it later. Then he and the kid would leave together, slipping out into the dark with the jangling of bells, and he could feel the whispers, the wild erotic speculation, and it seemed to him like a wishful voyeurism, and sometimes it made him feel powerful, and sometimes it made him feel sick. The boys never said anything to him even if they suspected because after all Remus was the only thing standing between them and the Viet Cong.

One day just after his mother died he drove to Burlington to see a psychoanalyst who had been recommended by Dr. Slughorn. He rehearsed his statement in the car on the way. “I am homosexual. My mother just passed and I cannot help but blame myself. I was beaten near to death a year ago and haven’t healed or at least not near all the way and I know I never will. I can’t sleep and I hardly eat and no one will speak to me. I want to feel better and I want to know my options.”

 --

On August 29th at 7pm he went to the diner to meet S. Black. Albus had said 7:30 but Remus knew Pettigrew drove like a bat out of hell. He was a mousy kid, a child of immigrants living in Troy, himself avoiding the draft on account of his asthma. Remus had met him once, on Albus’s farm, when he took over the route from Barre to the border. Fenwick, the previous driver, had himself been conscripted, and Albus had taken over the route for a while but he claimed to be too busy and too conspicuous. James Potter, the driver to the North, was a former student of Albus’s with connections to Draft Resistance groups in Toronto and Quebec City; Remus had never met him.

In the back corner booth Mrs. Evans brought him coffee and the ceramic sugarbowl, a quick nervous flash of a smile, a menu she knew he would pick through and put aside. He looked idly through the handwritten specials on a sheaf of notebook paper inside and put the menu down on the other side of the table for the kid when he came in. Usually they would order a hamburger and eat it ravenously. One of the draft dodgers had come up from Florida and claimed to have not eaten but for peanuts in a week, no money, too skittish to shoplift. He had a cigarette and finished the coffee and Mrs. Evans brought the pot over to refresh it. “Anything to eat honey.” She’d quit talking to him when the rest did but she’d started again when his mother died. They used to quilt together when Remus and Lily were children.

“No thanks, ma’am.”

She went to the jukebox and put on CCR’s new single Fortunate Son and she flashed Remus another smile. He watched at the old oak outside the window motionless in the evening. Dog days. Even in Vermont near on too hot to move the past week. Still and stiff, the air itself sweating. Beyond it across the fields the sunset was spreading out. He watched it and he let his eyes shift out of focus until all the color blurred bright, refracting in the glass, mirrored into his own face, and then the bells rang in the door. It was too hot for anyone else in the diner to summon the desire to turn and look and it took Remus so long to reorder his mind that he only noticed the kid when he had sat opposite in the booth pushing his backpack before him, sound in the leather, shifting a hand through his sweaty black hair, hastily cut and piled atop his head. He offered the same hand to Remus to shake. He was smiling across the bridge of his wide mobile mouth with a flash of teeth and his eyes were a vivid bright gray, all joyous wild mischief like a misbehaving dog, and Remus thought, with every corner of his fragmented mind, _fuck_. He took the kid’s hand across the table – long and bony white fingers – and clasped instead of shook. “Black,” said the kid, “You must be Lupin; Pettigrew said you’d be in the back corner drinking coffee and looking lobotomized…”

“That’s unkind.”

“He’s frightened of you,” said Black, “He sweat through his shirt when we got off the highway. He went white at the mention of your name.” He picked up the menu but his silvery eyes were searching Remus’s face and it looked like he was reading something very fast. “Do we have time to eat? I can ask to take it to go if not you know it’s just Pettigrew wouldn’t stop all the way up from Albany and I’ve had one piece of beef jerky all day.”

“You can eat,” Remus said, “We’ll pay for it for you. It’s alright.”

Black leaned over his menu across the table and Remus watched at the stray black hairs at the corners of his eyebrows. “Who’s bankrolling this thing?”

Albus had coached him in the standard answer for this question, which their clientele asked frequently. “Couple of folks,” said Remus. The truth was Albus mostly paid for it all with cannabis sales and his savings from his professorship but they were to keep his name out of the matter at all costs. “It doesn’t cost much, you know, it’s just meals and gas.”

“And your time,” said Black, “and maintenance on your car I’m sure.”

“My dad’s truck’s frankly supernatural,” Remus said, “and I don’t sleep much so I’ve got nothing better to do.”

They usually did not talk this much and they usually acted like there was someone pursuing them directly. They were always hunching low over their dinner and coffee and looking back over their shoulders and they asked Remus if anyone was looking at them, and Remus would always say, they’re not looking at you, they’re looking at me. You’re my twenty-somethingth partner in this waltz and it’s all performative anyway. Now Black was glancing curiously around the diner and finally over toward the jukebox which was playing Jefferson Airplane. When he turned back he leaned conspiratorially over the table again. “Everyone in this goddamn establishment is staring at you. Or I guess intermittently between you and their veal parmesan.”

“I’m very famous here.”

Black smiled again crookedly and Remus supposed it had been the right answer. “I love this song,” he said, “Don’t you?” Clearly if it had been any other war he would not have been drafted at all because he must have been truly fucking crazy. He was singing along under his breath with Grace Slick until Mrs. Evans came over. Then he said, “Hi.” He was beaming. His hair was falling out from where he’d tucked it behind his ear and it had been so long since it had been washed that it was shifting out in loose curls and the separating strands caught the sunlight through the window. He had missed a spot shaving along his jaw and on his neck amidst the veins there were soft and light summer freckles slipping into his shirtcollar. “Could I get a burger,” he said, it seemed rather loudly, “rare, like, hardly cooked rare, with no onions. Oh! And French fries. Double French fries… Lupin, will you eat fries?”

He and Mrs. Evans and the entire diner looked across the table and Grace Slick was hollering, “Feed your head!” Remus took two tries to make his voice work and on the second he said, “No.”

“Alright,” said Black, “still, double fries, please.” Mrs. Evans left, taking the menu, with a seemingly pointed look at Remus he could not decipher. Black leant again across the table. “Have you dropped acid?”

“No.”

“Really!”

“No. I never had the opportunity.”

“It’s alright. It’s not for everybody. Tell you the truth at first I worried I was dying.” He took his own cigarettes out of his shirtpocket and offered Remus one and he lit them with matches torn from a book illustrated with a tiny colonial building and embossed with the name of a hotel in West Virginia. Around his cigarette he said “I suppose I shouldn’t ask if you’re awaiting your own judgment or if you’ve got a deferment.”

“Deferment,” Remus said, “4-F. Medical purposes.” He indicated the scar through his eye.

“Accident on the farm?”

“No.”

“Ah,” said Black, and his eyes kind of brightened in a way Remus was not sure he liked. “It must be bad if they won’t take you.”

“Fractured my skull. And my leg in two places and a couple ribs.”

“That’s a good one.” Remus could not help but kind of laugh. “No, it really is! Plenty of guys cut off toes and fingers to no avail.” He leaned back against the leather booth and Remus heard his boots slide against the linoleum under the table. “I would know. I’ve tried nearly everything except that.”

“And nothing caught?”

“Not a damn thing.” He yawned. “I burnt my draft card on the steps of Charleston City Hall and I told a great number of psychiatrists I heard disembodied voices and I even dropped acid every other day for two weeks. That hardly did much, because you can’t even fake like you’re addicted to LSD. I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. It’s nothing like that song.”

“I thought hearing voices would do you for sure.”

“Not in 1969,” said Black, stubbing out his cigarette beside Remus’s collection in the ashtray, “and not with my father.”

“Who’s your father?”

“He’s a colonel. He was in Korea. It was of his opinion that I’d get out of Nam over his dead body.” He smiled across the table. His hands were folded, delicately at the wrists, over his chest. “Eight more hours to go before we prove him dearly wrong, yes?”

“More like nine.”

Black was still grinning. “That’s alright.” Then he sat up straight and leaned once more across the table. Remus could smell mint on his breath and his stale sweat. His boots slipped across the floor again. Probably he had never sat still a second in his whole life. “I came up from South Carolina on night buses. Paid all in cash. I got to New York but I got mugged at Port Authority so I had to hitchhike to Albany. Have to tell you the money was no great loss; it was from pawning my mother’s old jewelry. The way I see it likely it was obtained through imperialist means one way or another.”

“You sound like the college kids on the late-night radio.”

He snapped his fingers. “That was the other thing I tried! Undergraduate deferment. Halcyon days! I studied chemistry for some fucking reason and I even thought if the war wasn’t over I’d go to graduate school. But then I guess they would have got me to make napalm or Agent Orange or something. And regardless I only made it half a goddamn semester before they changed the draft law. Do you want another cigarette?” He took the pack out of his pocket and waved it in Remus’s general direction. When he received no response he said, “Did you go to school?”

“Half of high school,” Remus told him, “then I got a GED. I kind of resigned myself – I knew I would get drafted and I was kind of ready for it. I wouldn’t’ve volunteered but I was ready for it. And then this happened.”

Mrs. Evans brought Black his dinner from the kitchen and set it down gently with a tight smile which faded to a familiar kind of accusatory glare when it passed to Remus. Of course she seemed perfectly fine with the whole thing when the boys hardly spoke or when they weren’t handsome. Black’s plate was towering with fries at such a height they concealed the burger. Remus had to look away while Black ate and he watched at the still unmovement outside, golden as it all was in advance of the sunset. Then, with his mouth full, Black said, “What’s your first name?”

Remus looked at him across the table. There was a smear of ketchup in the corner of his mouth and salt crystals on his hand from the fries glimmering and something about him still looked hungry.

“I’m not a cop,” Black said. “You’re already in deep with the aiding and abetting anyway.” He covered his mouth with one hand and swallowed. Muscles in his throat moving. Remus looked into the swirling black hole center of his own coffee instead. Black dregs constellated against the white. “My first name’s Sirius.”

“Seriously?”

He laughed one bright bark laugh and heads about turned again. “Yes. My brother’s Regulus.”

“Goddamn.”

“My parents are pretentious assholes.”

“I can fucking tell.” He had never told any of the others his first name before and he didn’t think even Pettigrew knew it. But it was easy to say, “My name’s Remus.”

Black – Sirius Black – laughed again. “Your folks find you in a den of wolves or something?”

“There’s this town in New York called Romulus and my mom was from there. West of Albany there are these lakes – the Finger Lakes, they look like scars. She used to say, she and my dad, they were driving through and my dad said, If this is Romulus, where’s Remus?”

He was hardly used to talking about things like this. He was hardly used to talking at all to anyone his own age and usually these boys were just biting their nails and asking, isn’t there a faster route? He still could hardly speak about his mother to anyone outside his psychoanalyst in Burlington. But Sirius was smiling from across the table a crooked sweet smile in the shifting golden light through the window. Then he said “Have some fries, Remus.”

When they had cleaned the plate Mrs. Evans brought the check and Remus paid it with a crisp ten-dollar bill Albus had given him for gas money. Sirius contributed from his pockets a few scattered coins for a tip. He was tall, standing, taller than Remus by a hair and mostly legs, like a stalking saltmarsh bird, the sleeves turned up to the elbow on his collared blue work shirt and it tucked into brown pants, a mismatched woven leather belt, scuffed black Oxford shoes worn soft. He swept a hand through his hair again and together they went out with the ringing bells into the heat and the sunset, Remus following, watching the amateur ducktail wedge cut at the nape of Sirius’s neck, the sunburned shell of his ear, skin sunburnt red even beneath the smooth olive tone of it and glowing with sweat, his collar limp, the breadth of his shoulders in the back of his shirt, backpack over one slung in a strong slope, buttons on it – NIRVANA NOW, and DRAFT BEER NOT STUDENTS… Then Sirius turned – Remus stilled, feeling caught in the act – and he said “I don’t know which truck is yours.”

“Rusty red one.”

Sirius threw his backpack high up in the bed of it and went around to the passenger side and climbed in, beaming. “This feels like a tank.”

It took Remus three tries to start the thing up. “This is what I’ll be in defending the Northeast Kingdom in the case of homeland invasion.”

“Eight shotguns in the backseat.”

“More than that, are you kidding me?” said Remus, backing out of the lot. “Clearly you know shit about Vermont.”

“Spray paint FUCK BREZHNEV on the side.”

“I just have to get a cassette player so I can drive around blaring Back in the USSR.”

Sirius laughed. The self-preservationist part of Remus’s brain screamed, STOP FLIRTING. “You should get a cassette player just in general.”

“College radio’s good when you can get it.”

“I thought you said it was too peace-mongering for your tastes.”

“They play good music between all the proselytizing.”

Sirius leant his whole upper body out the window to lift up the antenna and the air rushing up the hood whipped in his hair. When he sat back down he turnt up the volume dial and the speakers played static intercut with hallucinatory glass snippets, Happiness is a Warm Gun.

\-- 

They drove North on route 62 into the spreading dusk and into the swimming summer nightmare world of Remus’s nocturnal wanderings, insomniac through the willful darkness, the dream of the perhaps-false memory. He could drive these roads with his eyes shut and had on his bad nights – Northerly through the capitol, government buildings with their gilded domes fading in darkness, onto route 12 past the edge of town, up through Worcester on the flank of the state forest where he and his father had once hunted deer.

“This is your state capitol,” said Sirius in Montpelier, in pure disbelief. He had his sharp elbow out the window and at stoplights he waved at passersby. Remus had particularly liked Montpelier since everything happened because there nobody knew him but it was close enough to home and it was quiet. Once he had thought that after his father died he should move there and find an apartment and a job at a warehouse or perhaps as a night janitor in one of the government buildings. There were always places for rent and they seemed inexpensive. But then he figured he could leave the house and the farm gladly, but not the cemetery, and if he moved away perhaps the new owners would not condescend for him to be buried there, and perhaps they would have the whole thing torn out.

Remus asked about where Sirius came from, in Charleston, South Carolina. He himself had never been South of Springfield Massachusetts. “Hotter than hell,” Sirius said. “Feels quite like hell come to think of it. You get the feeling everyone’s pretending at some mass delusion, like the Civil War never happened. They talk about the good old days, you know, as though any of them remembered it. Lovely though, quite lovely, with the white houses, you know, the hanging moss, the thick forest.”

“Sounds like Vietnam.”

Sirius laughed. He said “Not far off probably. The old French plantations and the overgrown rivers, bayous, tidal islands. Death in the trees. A bunch of old white guys sitting in an air-conditioned tearoom somewhere making uninformed decisions.” He took another cigarette from his front pocket and a second for Remus without being asked. “Can I ask you a question.”

Remus took the cigarette and leant across the console so Sirius could light it. “Depends on what it is.”

The match flared, sulfur, a burst of light, red-gold across their faces. Rush of smoke, then nicotine. Sirius shook the match out and threw it out the window into the cooling darkness. “Will you tell me what happened to you?”

It was nearly fully dark now but for the moon. “Got beat up,” Remus said, “about eighteen months ago. Pretty bad, I mean, I told you already. There were two guys but they never got caught. The doctor said they probably meant to kill me but, you know, here I am.”

“Did they do it – was there some reason?”

It was my own fault. I was drunk. It is best, said his psychoanalyst in his mind, that you keep these feelings to yourself. It is best that you leave any area where these feelings are triggered. The shuffled papers slipped, AND WHEN I HOLD YOU, sang John Lennon, IN MY ARMS… AND I FEEL MY FINGER ON YOUR TRIGGER… I KNOW NOBODY CAN DO ME NO HARM… BECAUSE… And Remus said “Not that I know of.”

It seemed Sirius could tell that was a lie, Remus could see his brow tighten out of the corner of his eye. But he didn’t press it, and instead he said, “Is that why you get shock treatment?”

Remus nearly spat out the cigarette. “Pettigrew told me,” Sirius went on. “He made you out to be some knuckle-dragging farm boy from the woods with a Dark Secret. At first I thought maybe you were a werewolf or something.”

“Well, I mean it is the full moon.” He was mortified to hear the tremble in his voice. “What do you think I am now?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Sirius, but something in it made Remus skeptical. “I’m enjoying talking to you. I wouldn’t know about it if he hadn’t spilled the beans. I mean, one of my cousins had that stuff and it was like he was an empty box. But you’re not.”

“I am just after,” Remus told him for some fucking reason. He supposed he had always wanted to confess it to someone. “I can’t remember anything for a couple hours. Like, probably even if you asked me my name, I don’t know. But they only do it once every few months.”

“When was the last time?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“And does it work?”

He laughed, recognizing his ugliest laugh, the one he never meant to laugh and always wanted to apologize for afterwards. His cigarette butt burnt his fingers and he stubbed it out in the truck’s overflowing ashtray. “No.”

“Why do you keep doing it?”

“That’s like, ten questions and counting.”

“You can ask me as many as you want after. Why do you keep doing it?”

“I hope maybe someday it’ll work,” Remus said, “the doctor says maybe someday it’ll work. Like, I think maybe I have to shuffle my brain up enough, if I shuffle it enough times, it’ll go back in the right order. How it used to be, before this, and before my mom died.” Not said: he hoped it would go back in the right order except normal. That when he woke up and felt like himself again it would be himself without that accursed fucking thing. The self-hating cackling starved thing strung between his brain and heart and gut and groin.

“You know they think that we haven’t shuffled a deck of cards every possible way yet, since we invented cards.”

He looked at Sirius in the dark, the moonlight blue in his hair and skin, and the look in his eyes was like a detective’s or something, or like his doctor, whose expression always said something like, you need to swallow, for your own damn good, bitter fucking pill after bitter fucking pill. There was a cold and condescending cruel kind of smile around his mouth and his brow intently furrowed and Remus thought, perhaps he thinks I haven’t entertained every goddamn possibility. “I know that,” he said.

“You don’t think maybe there are even more sheets in your brain than cards in a deck?”

“I believe it,” said Remus. He hadn’t been angry for a long time and he had missed it. It was like a sharp bright hurt, a good sweet tearing hurt; the sadness was festering. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I don’t know if it’ll ever work,” he said. “I know it’s better now than how it was. It’s something to try.” Sirius opened his mouth again but Remus stopped him. “Why don’t you want to go to Vietnam.”

“Ah,” Sirius said. “Well now it’s mostly on principle. I’ve been trying so fucking hard for so fucking long, you know? I’d prefer it weren’t all a waste of time. But at first, it was more – well politically, it’s not something I can ascribe to. It comes down to imperialism and fear. One, our overblown sense of manifest destiny. And two, trying to fix our own mistakes – the same mistakes we keep making over and over, in this misinformed and generally ill-considered attempt to police the world. And three, the ruling class, they worship capitalism like some demon god, they make blood sacrifices to it in shacks in the woods, and they’re out of their minds with this fear of communism, they fear it to death and it keeps them up at night, and they send poor kids to die defending the system, the machine…”

“I asked,” Remus interrupted, “why you, I mean you personally, why you don’t want to go to Vietnam; I didn’t ask for the Haight-Ashbury revue.”

Sirius took a frustrated breath and it was quiet for a minute in the car. Remus could hear some Grateful Dead in the static but he couldn’t tell which song. “I don’t think it’s right,” Sirius said finally. “That’s what it boils down to. I don’t want to kill anyone in the name of America and I don’t want to die for America. It’s hardly worth it to me. I’d rather die for something else.”

“Are you sure you’re not just afraid to die?”

“If you drop acid even just one time you won’t fear death anymore,” said Sirius. “Trust me on that.”

“You don’t think about like, the Viet Cong killing villagers. Women and children. Mass graves, you know, pits of hacked-up bodies; you’ve seen the photos. You don’t want to stop that?”

“Of course I do. I would be heartless not to. I also want to stop all the wars in Africa, and I want to stop Apartheid, and the Troubles. I want to stop people killing each other and hurting each other all over the world. But the US Government thinks we ought to put men on the ground in Vietnam out of all the places in the world where people are killing each other, because of their domino theory, or what the fuck have you. And I mean, I know you know about My Lai. And what they say, we had to destroy the village in order to save it…”

The moon cast the sky in a royal navy and the hills and the trees about darker in their shadow, layered sheets of blackened color. Here and there the lights from houses and cars in the darkness and the reflectors on the tight curves and shining in the road like collapsed stars. “That,” said Remus, the words feeling snatched out, “is what scares me.”

“What is?”

“That we could do those things – ” that I could do those things – “or that evil is catching.”

“Yes,” said Sirius, “and you know, musing on the king my brother’s wreck, he wrote wild fucking things.” 

“Is he dead?”

“Don't know for sure. I guess probably, because he was reported Missing in Action; we got the letter, just before I left. He’s, or maybe was, a Green Beret. Special ops. They sent him upriver into the jungle looking for somebody, American officer, colonel I think he said, who fucking lost it, went rogue and now he commands tribal folk and deserters from the bush, and even before they made him do that Reg said things, like he said, men forgot what evil was… They lost every vestige of their so-called moral judgment. Reg said he thought it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were all animals, you know, deep down, in the Heart of Darkness, yadda yadda. And that scares me too, I won’t deny it, but then I think, you don't have to go to Nam to tell that. Look at what happened to you.”

“I can tell you it made – or I guess it makes me feel like an animal. I'll never forget – I haven't gone hunting since; I recall being prey. It's like I was colorblind and in blinders for a minute. Tunnel vision, you know, you can only see an escape route, and you’d do just about anything to keep it open.”

“You're like Bambi and they were wolves. That's the thing. But over there when you think about it I don't know who's Bambi and who's the wolf. I mean we have these fucking boys – seventeen and scared shitless, but we also have napalm. We have military technology we as civilians will never know about. And there’s things that happen over there that we’ll never know about. They tried to make it so no one would know about My Lai.”

“That’s a bad thought. That anyone at all can erase history.”

“In the service of the imperialist juggernaut,” said Sirius. “In the name of manifest destiny.” In the scant moonlight Remus saw him chewing his fingernails in order to save his last few cigarettes. “It scares me to think about what my dad might’ve done in Korea.”

Remus had some far-removed cousin, a relation of his father’s, who had died there under never-illuminated circumstances and had subsequently been buried in the family cemetery at the foot of the hill beneath the house outside Barre. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Sirius, “I don’t even know if anything did. But I worry, right, like you said, that evil is catching. And now they can’t find my brother, and I don’t know what he did – what he’s doing. So I also think – goddamn. I’ve never said this to anyone before.”

So at least they tread some similar ground on that front. Another truck arose from a low vale and advanced towards them on the road and in the vivid plane of light Remus saw Sirius was looking at the side of his face with an expression that pleaded for him to look back. Remus reminded himself only death was in there. “It’s alright,” he said, watching the road. The other truck swept past and the light faded and Sirius turned back toward the dashboard. “I’ve got no reason to blackmail you.”

Sirius sighed and chewed off his thumbnail. “You ever worry about what you inherited from your family?”

“I won’t get anything until my father dies.”

“I mean psychologically. I mean like, wrong things in your brain.”

If there were Lupins like him none of them had ever spoken up and in any case they were all now dead that he knew of. It seemed to have been something he developed on his own, whatever unique sickness in his own brain; that was another reason to wrestle it out. “I don’t – not really, no.”

“My family, they – well it seems like they have that heart of darkness thing, but it isn’t so deep down, you know.” He started in on another fingernail and Remus wanted to still his hands. “It’s right up front. It comes out damn easy. If my father could’ve beaten me into going to Vietnam he would’ve done it. He tried to do, in fact. My mom’s the same; I can tell you she was waiting her turn outside the kitchen door. And both sides, way back, they were slaveowners, they were KKK, you name it. And I worry about, I worry all the time, like if I went to Vietnam, I would get – I would get that same thing. The Black heart, as it were. Or even if – just, being alive. I worry every day that it’ll happen.”

Remus wasn’t sure if he meant it but he said, “I don’t think it will.” 

“No?”

“You’ll be watching for it; you’ll catch it.”

“I don’t know, Remus, I mean – you can’t understand what it feels like, because you’re a good man.”

“Nearly everybody in Barre would argue your point on that.”

"Those redneck motherfuckers," Sirius said loudly, and it echoed in the car. The silvers of his eyes were huge and glowing like cats’ in the dark. "Listen, I know why those boys did this to you cause any other reason you'd've fallen over yourself trying to tell me. I know why they did it and I don't know how you even think for a second that that makes you bad and it makes them good. They would have killed you because they're afraid to be you. That is cowardice of the highest goddamn order." 

Remus’s whole being had gone into survival mode with first impulse being fight despite the resounding failure of both reactions last time. "Does that mean cowardice is evil?" 

"You're derailing."

"So are you." 

Sirius was quiet, for once, and on the road ahead the headlights spread circles of vivid white. "Well, I think it often is. And it seems to me, sometimes they go hand and hand. Like, you're susceptible to evil if you're a coward. You forfeit a lot when you forfeit your spine. And maybe it is cowardly not to go to Vietnam, so maybe I’m bringing all this upon myself. But also, we're cowards to be there in the first place. And I know it would be cowardly not to stand up for what I think, which is that this is a bullshit war, which we will never win, which we should not be fighting, and like every American imperialist impulse, it exists primarily to make rich men richer. And I mean, no Viet Cong ever called me faggot, to paraphrase Ali." 

Remus wanted to look at him but could not lest he run the truck off the rough road into the thick forest. He was sure if he lifted his hands from the wheel and the stickshift they would both be shaking. In the corner of his eye he saw Sirius with a not-quite-grin around his mouth of some special flavor, like he was trying for a big gotcha! but he was really very nervous. Remus’s mouth tasted like ash – not for the first time he feared irredeemably. “Folks call you faggot on the street?”

“Yeah, and they have a whole thesaurus,” said Sirius. “But that’s all they ever dare. And my own family have said considerably worse since I was about ten years old so it doesn’t faze me. What it says to me is, I could fight a war for liberation on American soil, right now. I don’t have to go and do that in someone else’s country. Did you hear what happened in New York in June?” Remus could hardly speak. He shook his head no, and Sirius went on. “Police raided a gay bar and they all fought back. Street kids, drag queens, queers of every stripe. The tide’s changing.”

No, Remus said inside his own mind. Here in the stagnant backwater there is no light because there is no moon and so there is no tide at all. Nothing moves, here. Nothing revolves. He swallowed it all, the ash and the bitterness, stiff against the back of his tongue like strong black tea. The words he patterned carefully, heart slamming like a door. “But you. I mean. They misconceive – ”

“They don’t,” Sirius interrupted. “Likely they’d call just about any hippie-type dude faggot but they’re not wrong when it comes to me.”

“You’re not nervous to say a thing like that?”

"Well, plenty of people lie about it to the draft board. I knew it wouldn’t work for me unless I got caught red-handed, as it were, so I thought I would just pick someone up and stage the whole thing. Anyway my father saw right through it, and I realized I rather liked it. So I kept doing it, albeit under more private circumstances.” The nervous edge was gone from the smirk around his mouth and Remus couldn’t read the thing that had replaced it. “So I’m not nervous to say a thing like that. Especially not in present company, given you've been looking at me this whole time like I’m some Hitchcock Blonde. I can tell you like me and I can tell you're afraid. And I get it, but the thing is, I like you too, I hell of like you, and I'm not afraid." 

Remus had never seen a Hitchcock movie, and he had never thought of a contingency plan for what he would do if this happened again. Of course Sirius was lying to him but for what purpose he could not discern. He did recognize fear, screaming and screaming and screaming in the recesses of his own mind, fear of death and pain and more loss, fear that he would go back on everything, fear that there had in fact been no progress at all, fear and then shame, the sick naked rotting shame, creeping through his gut, through his every scar – shame that Sirius could tell, shame that his heart skipped at the sound of it. Shame, shame, shame for everything. And then deep in it, the same nervous little matchflare. “You can't be serious.”

Sirius laughed at that. “I can be. I am. I swear, since we got in this car I’ve been thinking, would he be on top, or could I?”

His heart dropped into his stomach or lower and the imagining swept unbidden into his mind before he could quash it. He thought, please; he said, “Christ.”

“I mean, would you?” 

“Jesus fuck,” said Remus, “I don't know. I've never done it one way or the other.”

“It's alright," Sirius told him. He had tucked one foot under the opposite thigh and was leaning toward Remus across the stickshift. “It's all about how you feel like in the moment.”

“Please stop talking about it.”

“Why.” It was hardly a question. “Don't be scared.” 

“I'm not scared.”

“That is flagrant fucking bullshit. You're afraid of giving yourself what you want because it backfired the one time you ever tried it before.”

He had never wanted to fuck so badly in his life and he had never wanted a fistfight so badly in his life. When he heard his own voice it sounded like he was walking coals. “Is that what you think happened?”

“I’m right, aren’t I? I know how they do it. They pretend they’re into you and – ”

“Stop,” said Remus, voice shaking, “Stop, stop, stop. You can't fucking imagine.”

“I can't. So I'm not. I'm just saying the situation's hardly comparable. You’re in control right now. You could throw me out of this car and call the cops and they'd send me to Nam.” He watched for a second intently at the side of Remus's face. “I like you. Trust me. You're handsomer than sin. You look like one of the Zombies.” Remus felt a kind of choked laugh escape his throat and he saw, vivid in his peripheral and bright in the dark, Sirius with his crooked grin. “I always loved that song She's Not There. I want – every scar you have I want to see it. I wanted to since I saw you in the diner. And I want to fuck you, if you want, or you can fuck me.” 

All Remus could get out was “I can't.”

“Why can't you.”

“Not since. It's just. I can't say.”

Sirius reached for his forearm across the console and wrapped his long white hand around it with the thumb moving in a slow fan and Remus felt his own hand tighten on the stickshift. Sirius pressed his thumb in against the swollen vein and Remus could feel his pulse, or his own. Thunder flare of his eyes in the dark. “It doesn’t matter. I want to get naked with you and figure it out. I know I can get you off one way or another. Satisfaction guarantee.”

“I can’t,” Remus said again. He tried to put force in it but it cracked halfway through.

“You're willing to fry up your brains like an egg but you won't let me suck – ”

“Fuck you.”

“I already said you can.”

“Black, I mean it, _fuck_ you.”

Sirius lifted his hand and crossed his arms over his chest again. “You're a damn coward.”

“God, and you're not?”

“I didn't say I wasn't. I know you think I'm a coward and I think you're a coward too. Mutually assured. How's that?”

“I can't - Sirius, even if we - we'd be fucking killed.”

“It doesn’t matter. You have to willing to die for something or other.”

“For sex though?”

“Why not?” His hand slipped over Remus's on the stickshift and tightened. “And for living how you want and being how you want and saying, I will not hate myself, I will not deny myself, I'm my own man, they can't have me. The breeders can't have me, the draft can't have me, my parents can't have me, only I have me.” His thumb again drifting. “You know this is what they wanted for you, those boys. They wanted you to shut up for good and be scared to ever fuck.”

“God.” He thought he would weep with the anger and the everything else. “You're fucking cruel.”

“Truth is cruel.”

“Why the fuck – I don't understand why the fuck you care.”

“I like you. I wish I could have known you before all this. You're a good person and you don't deserve to feel like you're wrong. For being queer or being sad or being hurt. You're very smart and you help people and I see you live to help people. Even after everything. And many things about you are very brave. I know you're braver than I am. This is your one cowardice and it doesn't mesh. And it's funny because most people will do very brave things in order to get laid. So I wanna know why.”

“I keep telling you; I've never not been punished for it.”

“I know. I won't. I can't guarantee it'll end well but love is pain. What's the Shakespeare quote?”

“I don't remember.”

“It doesn't matter. It's worth the risk. I can show you.”

“You keep saying – ” Remus could hardly order his brain. It felt almost like it did to take Valium – “you keep saying that, you keep saying, it doesn’t matter.”

“So?”

“So of course it does. So of course all of this fucking matters. It should matter to you that I say I can’t and that I’ve never done anything like it before and that I can’t remember anything that I should remember and most of all it should matter to you that – well, this is like ammunition. It’s like putting a gun in someone’s fucking hand.”

“Well, I put a gun in your hand and you put one in mine; we’re at a stalemate, no?”

“That hardly answers the fucking question.”

“You didn’t ask a fucking question!”

“Goddamn, why does nothing matter to you when it should?”

He pulled the truck off the road into the shadow and he saw out of the corner of his eye Sirius brace himself like for a fight at first, until he saw the lights of the border crossing up ahead. Albus had some sort of agreement with the border guards on staff here and they wouldn’t ask questions about the trucks that would pull over into the shadow of the thick forest and put the lights off until dawn. Remus guessed it was just after four AM; the clock in the truck had stopped years ago and neither he nor his father had bothered to fix it. There was a song on the radio he couldn’t make out through the angry buzz in his ears. Sirius said “Plenty of things matter to me. We have different priorities, you and I.”

“You don’t prioritize fucking staying alive – ”

“Of course I fucking do, idiot,” Sirius hissed, and Remus could feel him losing his temper, for the first time, it unraveling like a braid, dark in the dimness. “You’re driving me to Canada so I can dodge the fucking draft. Of course I prioritize staying alive. If anyone were to try and kill me for being fucking queer that’d be on them and not on me. It would show them for what they are. And I would die for the right to live like I want. And, I don’t get how you don’t see it, they’re killing you, actively they are, piece by piece, to make you live how they want.”

“Who the fuck is _they_?”

“That thing,” said Sirius, “I don’t know what to call it. I hate it. I could get into it but you’d just call me an acid-head hippie again.”

“Because you fucking are.”

“Perhaps true. At least I’m alive.”

Remus looked at him in the pale wash of moonlight through the hanging trees. Across the console Sirius was reading his face again like a book with silverfish eyes moving very fast, and he looked the picture of calm except he was gripping the edge of his seat with white knuckles and Remus could see he had sweat through his blue shirt.

He was very tired. Really so very tired and he could hardly be bothered anymore but he was so angry, and he wanted so badly, and it had been so long since he had even imagined. Gold fog in his head, cold stone in his belly. He let fall the vigilance like a weddingveil and Sirius must have sniffed it out in the air because they leant forward into each other at the same time.

 --

The radio from Burlington, its reception crystalline and miraculous, played a new song by a band called the Stooges titled I Wanna Be Your Dog. Sirius laid him out in the bed of the truck on the flannel blankets Remus's father kept there for the animals. Up the road the lights from the border crossing dimmed the spreading field of stars and at dawn Potter would be there waiting but it was more than an hour still til dawn. “You've really never done anything like this?” Sirius asked, not far from breathless. His cheeks were pink or perhaps it was only the heat and his mouth would not close all the way. He kissed Remus again against the lower lip and passed his tongue over gently, soft gold trail, then again at his neck, inside his collar. A shiver passed throughout. Quicksilver, trembling. He touched the nape of Sirius's neck where his hair was shorn and soft and damp at the temples with a clean sweat. The sunburnt shell of his ear peeling soft paper. Under his shirt just past the waist of his pants, the sharp bone of his hip, the soft pocket of skin just above, inside its narrowing. When Sirius pulled back he look aghast at his luck and Remus laughed. They made short work of one another's clothes. It was so hot it was a relief to be naked and the flannel soft against his back. “This,” said Sirius, leaning back on his haunches. “This one's good.” He traced his long pointer finger ragged with its bitten nail over Remus's once-cracked ribs. The big stretching scars where the bone broke through and the delicate silver ones where the doctors cut the skin again to operate. A cluster of marks like the scraping toothy bite of some animal. 

“Steel toe boots,” said Remus. 

Sirius pressed his open mouth to it. “If they saw us now they would both be jerking their dicks and sobbing with jealousy.”

“I guess they would be.”

Sirius lifted his head at that and smiled, teeth catching blue light. “I can feel you rumbling when you talk. And I can feel your heart beating.” They kissed again, it tasted better than right, or like salt. He could feel his toes curl in the flannel. And Sirius, his skin tacky, summer sweat, face flushed, eyes and hair wild, who pulled just away to say against his jaw, “How – fuck – talk to me, Remus – ”

Above the tree canopy black against the sky. The stars sliding off. Days earlier he had watched the Perseids and days later he would really listen to the song on the radio and think about the words. To Sirius he let the words rip out from himself-if-not, from the lucky twin. “Just, please, please, touch me – ”

“Yeah,” and Remus could hear him breathe. Open hand against the ribs and Sirius looked at him in the dark like a precious antique to be repaired. His thumb set in the hollow groove of Remus’s breastbone and passed over his nipple and then again. A car went by not five yards away on the highway spreading a descending plane of light catching dust and pollen and the flash of Sirius’s eyes, and – hand inside his thigh, lips on the old staple marks, teeth inside his hip, quick breaths, and then there was nothing happening behind his eyes or inside his head. He thought there was something he wanted to tell Sirius but he couldn’t remember what it was, and he knew if he opened his mouth he would start sobbing, because it felt so good, or because it hurt so much, he didn’t know. Then the steady Doppler hum out of his own mind laid it all out flat as asphalt, falling into itself from a height, some hallucinatory lightness and a long sweet spread, white noise nothing.

When he could open his eyes he saw Sirius must have swallowed, which awed him. He had propped himself up on the heels of his hands hovering so close above Remus in the darkness he could feel the chest heaving. His eyes were reading again swiftly behind the heavy lids. Around, cicadasong, fading in. Remus shoved him over on his back and held him down by the shoulder and it took but three strokes of his hand before Sirius came in near silence, his mouth just open and the lips bitten red red red in the black and blue world.

\-- 

Remus, smelling rain, watched at the bend in the road for a telltale light against the close trees while Sirius reached through the back window into the cabin of the truck in search of his cigarettes, which he had left on the passenger’s seat. There was only one left and they split it leaning against the back of the bed. Remus had pulled his knees up to his chest in an attempt at modesty because it was far too warm to think about getting dressed but Sirius was sitting spread-eagled rather shamelessly and the matchflare cast golden light over his crotch, soft cock, damp thatch of dark hair. Around the cigarette he said, “Oh, this song.”

A tired but abiding affection in his voice with the gravel. The radio played The End, by the Doors.

“Come to Canada with me,” said Sirius.

“I don’t have a passport.”

Sirius looked at him in the dark and passed the cigarette over. “I figured that you didn’t but I wanted to ask.”

“Do you really mean it or do you think you owe me something?”

Sirius laughed. “I really mean it. We’re even, don’t you think?” Remus passed the cigarette back to him again. “This song is so depressing. It reminds me of the Waste Land.”

Sirius’s hand traced over his against the corrugated metal, white mirror, following bones, like water in an old streambed. There was a strand of his hair stuck to Remus’s shoulder. He always thought it was a sad song and he’d believed every word of it in the days it played through static on the radio disrupting the wingbeats of the deathbird in his own mind. Now he thought perhaps he wasn’t sure. He asked Sirius, “Do you really think it’s the end?”

After he said it he realized he did not know of what he spoke and it seemed Sirius didn’t either, for a while, when Remus could hear the cigarette paper burning in the silence, and the smoke Sirius breathed curled in the still air stacking and folding like a thundercloud. Then he said “I don’t think so.” Another long drag, and the ember fizzled, red and gold, blunt supernova in the dark. “At least I hope not. I don’t want this to be the end.”  

Then spoke the thunder. They kissed in the darkness, pulling each other closer and closer and both tasting smoke – the cigarette ember burnt a clean round puncture in the dogs’ flannel – until the rain came in earnest across the farmlands to the north, the wind strong and wild in advance of it pressing the heat down into the soil. They dressed quickly amidst the thick round first drops and then sat in the truck together watching at the light coming in the sky through the suddenly violent impressionist wash, scattering color in shreds against the windshield. And on the roof it beat a wild death-march heartbeat drum, like Civil War boys, or Remus’s own in his ears, like the pulse in Sirius’s wrist, itself a clock working beneath his thumb. Remus said “I don’t want this to be the end either.”

“It’s not,” said Sirius. His eyes were huge, veined red with exhaustion, the blacks of them wide in the dark. “Stop talking about it. You’ll jinx it.” He leant forward and kissed down the scar through Remus’s eye.

In the spreading dawn light he was almost sure they were both talking about the very world.

At the first press of the round ember of sun upon the horizon the rain had thinned enough they could see Potter’s red Jeep past the checkpoint, stationary in the fog. Sirius took Remus’s hand in his own and kissed the back of it, then the palm, then the pulse in Remus’s wrist, then his mouth, almost as an afterthought, like he’d thought he wouldn’t, but he felt compelled. He climbed out, throwing his backpack over his shoulder, and shut the door behind him, casting in his wake a gust of cool morning air, and he walked backwards toward the checkpoint, smiling, hand aloft, fingers splayed wide. When Remus rolled the window down to wave back he heard Potter start the Jeep’s engine, fifty yards away and inside a different world.

\-- 

Nearly a year later in his driving Remus found the house down a farm road outside of Williamstown whose outlet he had never before noticed. He figured later he had driven West on that road but never East, and the pullout was tight and hidden, so overgrown as to look like a driveway. With his heart pounding he pulled down the road with the long branches scraping the car, and the radio played the Beatles’ Across the Universe, a song from what they had called their final album. He thought it sounded like a song from some children’s movie, brilliant shimmering nostalgia, a kind of fog in itself clouding the truck’s dirty window. In ten minutes he pulled down a gravel path, a trestle of green, familiarity a sickening jolt in his belly and the nausea rising, liquid in his throat, his heart in his mouth, the panic rising for no reason at all in a black tunnel narrowing, narrowing into the house and behind it the spreading field, and the morning light, and the fields of corn, high and green, and the wheeling summer sky, the swiftly moving clouds, a thunderstorm in the South, and the heat of the day descending. And the house there, whitewash peeling in curls. High grasses in the lawn. Beer bottles strewn about, some shattered, cans crushed, blunt clips, clothing. Graffiti he did not care to decipher. He went inside through the hanging door.

So it had not been a dream. Inside it smelled like piss and pot, and there was an old bloodstain on the floor, waxy brown, set deep into the pale sunbleached floorboards. Black and white taper candles had melted into frozen wax puddles around it; probably it was high schoolers doing Ouija. He looked at it for a second, at the whole false ritual, and then he went out into the bright day. Through the window of the truck he could still hear Across the Universe, and then it faded out. Nothing’s gonna change my world…

He drove back to where he lived at a rooming house in Montpelier. He wrote another letter to Albus in prison at Chittenden, where he would spend at least another year on drug distribution charges. He read a couple more chapters of the Faulkner he was in the middle of, and he put Let It Be on the turntable and listened a few times through. Around three in the afternoon he ate, then he slept a few more hours, then at 10pm he went to work, at the bakery down the street, where he worked the night shift with a girl about his age. They kneaded dough and listened to the news radio from Vietnam. She had a boyfriend over there and she listened carefully, head down, and kneaded with aggression. Once or twice in the night she would perk up and turn up the volume dial with her white flour-dusty hands and listen very closely, then she would turn it back down again.

They hardly ever spoke and this night what would he tell her, if he could tell her? Today after two and a half years I am vindicated and know myself to be right in my own knowledge and confirmed in my own memory. I know now that everything that happened really happened and I am still alive. I went and looked at my own blood on the floor and I didn’t give a damn about it, as Hemingway would say.

It seemed like a nonevent and he was glad of it. At 6am when he left work he went to the payphone on the corner outside the bar where it had all begun and he made his weekly two-minute call to his father, who was well, and who told him the sows had given birth. His new truck was running good. His new farmhand was always hungover but otherwise a reliable help, and he would bring bottles of his homemade corn whiskey in apology. “Remind me to give you one, Remus,” said his father, “it tastes like cornbread but it’ll scorch your whole damn esophagus.”

They hung up and Remus walked back to the rooming house. Someone he had slept with a couple times, a docent at the state history museum, had put a note under the door; he burned it without reading and slept until noon. He ate lunch; he lay on the bed in a shaft of sun and read from the Faulkner and after a few hours he drifted off again, and when he woke he drove to the diner in Barre, and sat at the back corner table, and Mrs. Evans brought him a cup of coffee and a Danish. In December of 1969 they had established the draft lottery system based on birthdate and initials. Fewer men were drafted every year but still they came North. This man named Moody would run them up from Albany in place of Pettigrew, who had quit the gig when Albus was arrested. There was a new driver also across the border whom Remus had never met; he drove a pea-green Chevelle. Sometimes the boys would talk; never much. Remus had a cassette player in the truck now and he would let them pick out what they wanted to hear from his collection, which was in an antique suitcase beneath the seat. When they didn’t want to pick he would put on Beggars Banquet.

He sat in the back booth and recalled how it was before. He no longer checked the mailbox every day. And yet everytime he came to meet these boys there was some moment of sweet yearning, just a split second, where they sat across from him and smiled just out of pure relief, and he thought of Sirius.

\-- 

The man himself did not write until November. Remus’s father had had the letter forwarded from the farm, so it did not arrive until the first week of December. Remus came home from work at 6am in the cold dark morning knowing the docent would still be asleep in his bed, and he checked his mail for the first time in at least a week, because he was awaiting some new cassettes. The tapes were not there but he read the letter sitting on the tile floor, then he went and walked around Montpelier – Unreal City, he thought, under the brown fog of a winter dawn – wrapped in his duck coat against the wind. He crouched by the river until the clock tower tolled at nine, and he knew the docent would have to have gone to work. He went back home and lay on his back in the unmade bed and read the letter again:

 

Lupin –

My sincerest apologies for the year of total radio silence. It was never my intention but things fall apart, the center cannot hold, etc., and by now I expect you may have heard from Albus I ended up apprehended, and James as well, at a meeting of a draft resistance group in Toronto, and forcibly conscripted. I do not doubt my father's involvement... I am in Saigon now and have been these past few days awaiting an assignment. I suspect they will send me and James after my brother / in search of Cpl. Tom M. Riddle who's believed to be commanding his own troops of runaway GIs and Montagnard tribesmen upriver and over the Cambodian border into the Heart of Darkness. You may have seen photographs of some of his recent activities in Life Magazine last week if you have a subscription. Don't go look at it if you haven't already seen. They say he's started calling himself by some stupid French name in what seems to me a melodramatic and absurd post-colonialist rejoinder, etc… Savagely intent on culling Vietnamese self-determination though they say he borrows all his horrifying guerrilla tactics from the VC like a true white supremacist hypocrite. Does sound like an interesting character and I look forward to meeting him. 

Before we were selected for this mission me and James's battalion were defending some heavily landmined coastline outside of Hue. You may recall the name of the city from the monthlong siege in ’68 – it looks like London during the Blitz. The jungle here is wild and beautiful thick steaming green and sometimes at night I am reminded of late August in Vermont with you just more rot, more gunshots. The rockets red glare, etc. If I take acid and close my eyes sometimes I can feel your touch and sometimes I can't. Everyone else lies awake and looks at photos of their girls wearing poodle skirts and fucking culottes. Meanwhile I'm doing my best to stay alive so you can come pick me up at the USO. I think I love you but also I think I'm losing my mind, so I don’t know if you should take that seriously. I don’t even know if it’s really you or someone with your name I made up in attempt to convince myself, if I love him there’s something in my heart besides the darkness. Every second I can keep myself from turning the corner into my waiting madness is thanks to you condescending to get naked for me just one time and we had ten hours, Remus, it’s so insane, it makes me feel so insane. In this hotel room I can't put my back to the door or the window without a cold sweat. I don't know who's looking but I can feel someone. Sometimes I can see them moving in the middle distance. I know how you must have felt walking in the forest. Everything has something behind it and I don't even know what that something is. It's in every fucking shadow – between the motion and the act…

It is true what Reg said; a frightening number of soldiers have just come to the realization upon arrival in the jungle that they do in fact love killing. Sometimes their faces look inside out. Most days I know I’m not a monster but sometimes it’s hard. I don’t feel like a coward unless I really think about it but increasingly now I can't. I can't zoom out and there is no bigger picture. So I'm a deer, and I'm part of a wolf. I feel like a dog. I think about that Stooges song (remember?) and I think about you. 

Stay well. You can burn this letter if you want and never think of me again but please stay well. 

Yours 

S. Black

Saigon

South Vietnam

November 6 1970

 

Remus folded the letter again and rested it on his chest and looked out into the moving grey morning. The paper was so thin his rapid heartbeat stirred it. In the backyard through the blown glass and the lace curtains all the leaves had fallen. The first frost that year had been early. Perhaps later in the night it would snow. He had seen a whirl of flurries on his break at work a week previous, four AM, hued like cigarette smoke, scattering low upon the ground, but in the morning it was all gone, like it had never been.

After a while he got up and put on the Stones’ Let It Bleed. He made coffee and had a cigarette at the kitchen table. Then he filtered through his junk drawer and found the docent had left some of his stationery. He crossed out the name at the top with thick black marker and wrote a letter he mailed at the post office that night on his walk to work at nine-thirty with his footsteps echoing upon the pavement and the wind saying, what else was gone like it had never been? It went into the night – it never came back to you, do you remember? But he ignored it. In the back room of the bakery he and the girl listened to the news radio from Vietnam and over and over and over again into the night that had come out of nights and that became nights and nights even still evolving themselves in tandem with the other nights vivid as blood inside his memory it played the same the same the same the very same song.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a tiny bit of an apocalypse now AU. as a result there are also a few references to conrad's "heart of darkness," michael herr's "dispatches," the doors' "the end," t.s. eliot's "the waste land" and "the hollow men," and yeats's "the second coming." there's also a nod or two to tim o'brien's "the things they carried." otherwise the story was inspired by a true event from the life of a friend's father.  
> i've done my best to keep everything as accurately historical as possible but please feel free to correct me / call me out on anything i've gotten wrong here. i'm [here](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.  
> thank you as always to [K](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Taupefox59/pseuds/Taupefox59) for the second pair of eyes.


End file.
